Some background to all of you johnny-come-latelies
In the beginning ( and for me that was 12th of January 2006 ) we were a few developers ( darawk,malign,rz950, yours truly) trying to create a city of heroes emulator. The coding team fell apart pretty quickly, as of march 2006 I was pretty much the only active coder/RE guy left, with malign helping wherever he could ( the forums, svn and assorted administrative tasks ). After we've received legal threats from ncsoft ( February 2007 ) the original project was shut down. Since we did not feel we've done right by our irc friends, we've decided to create a project that would carry on the coxemu's spirit, but at the same time extend the scope of the whole endeavor. Thus SEGS was born.

This is excerpt from a post that was made on these forums almost five years ago, it represents our overreaching goal.

SEGS has a really simple goal: creating and facilitating creation of worlds.
(…)
SEGS will provide:

World selection service (Registration of worlds, Querying)
Asset management ( dynamic and static updates )
Various common MMO world components, both code ( AI algorithms, chat services, logging, persistence, load balancing, server templates, client components ) and content ( whole worlds, scripts, client-side assets etc.).
And as a part of SEGS we will provide source code for various worlds created using our platform.

Since that time, most of the work was concentrating on the CoX subproject, and progress was/is excruciatingly slow. That stems from the simple fact that most of the coding/RE work was/is being done by one person in whatever spare time he/she can find.Some recent history
After the shutdown of CoX was announced, the amount of activity has increased substantially and we've considered the various options available to us. I've talked with the fine folk of cohtitan's forums and at the time we've decided that server emulator was one of the possible ways to save whatever we could from the collapse. Since SEGS choice of very old client and using c++, clashed with choices of our titanic friends ( using pure c and the last available client ), we've decided that both projects will continue on their respective paths and we would provide whatever help we could to each other.

Since then I've set up a testing server, just to give us all some little hope. At the same time I've worked on some pretty complicated issues related to input processing and trying to patch the client to support newer GPU cards correctly. Both of those issues are far from being completed.

And now we come to the crux of this post

What would help the SEGS project to get 'there' faster ?
Developers, of course, and yet it seems that as a whole, there's not enough developers interested enough to stick with the project.
Now the simplest possible answer to this lack, would seem to be: money
Adding monetary incentives to project features could work, and at the same time it can kill it. The problems as I see them are:
We are on treacherous ground where CoX is concerned, especially if we get money involved in developing that part of SEGS.
On the other hand, we could only restrict incentives to general SEGS components. Yet still I would not feel right doing so. It would be like building the project using everyone's feelings of loss and exploiting their hopes.

At this point I feel the current approach of working exclusively on CoX is not the right one, and I should concentrate my efforts on other parts of the SEGS project ( script language integration, alternative clients etc. ) in hopes of attracting some developers, who might want to use those components in their own projects.

Thoughts, suggestions ?

"Ich was in one sumere dale,
in one suthe diyhele hale,
iherde ich holde grete tale
an hule and one niyhtingale."

If I'm understanding this correctly, SEGS originally started as a specific project (CoH Emulator), but after some legal threats it became a much broader project (Creation of Worlds), where a CoH Emulator was only part of it.

Even though the scope has increased, most of the work done since then and now has focused on the original goal.

Titan has not directly endorsed the project because of their side-line behaviour when it comes to legal issues (Reasonable), and the fact that an older client wouldn't satisfy the needs of all of the players (Only a sub-group).

To the lack of developers: Recruitment was a bit late. People with the necessary skills and available time were mostly scooped up in other areas. Any coders who actually would like to help this project now have a responsibility in other areas.
What is interesting is the fact that the original Plan Z split off into separate directions because of disagreements. If similar disagreements were to happen in either of the current projects, it could mean available time for some coders to come help. I think SEGS should be there, open and ready, just in case something goes wrong, so that if any coders would prefer to work on SEGS, they may.

There's also been little advertising for coders to help. A new thread on the Titan Forums would help (You've got the same authority both Plan Z's have, as you're a project with results). Facebook groups are a huge untapped pool of coders. Join any and all CoH Facebook groups (and servers) and ask for some help from potential coders. Of 100k CoH players, there's a certain percentage of those who can code, and a percentage of that who have available time. I'm sure there are people who can help you out a lot.

Money is a tough subject. I wouldn't expect too much of it at this point. You've already noted it creates a bit of an issue of someone making money off a private server. Your best bet is creating a method which allows purely donations. Say you could just use another cup of coffee. There are definitely people who have felt a little better logging into outbreak, and some of those people will tip you for that experience. At the same time, a donation wouldn't give you the added stress of needing to comply with demands or time constraints. I believe CoH Faces had something like this.

So if you do add a donation box. Don't advertise the money will go into the further production of something CoH related. That could be exploitation of people's hope for CoH to come back. Asking for a cup of coffee because you've given us a client + server is just people being nice. No tricks there.

Now, SEGS vs CoH emulator.
You're going to find a very strong bias from CoH players here. Any increased activity in the past couple of months definitely results from the CoH component. I understand that the development of SEGS as a whole could help coders in their own work, but to be honest there are little options for those who are not coders. I would stick to what is popular, and the primary attraction to the SEGS server and forums.

If there was nothing to show so far; if all you currently had was a string of numbers that represented the game we once played; I would be a lot more skeptical of the success of this project and whether it should be continued.

But that isn't the case. You have a client, you've got a server, multiple people have logged in and proclaimed their gratification in other places from it. You've already surpassed the point where most projects fail.

I think you should take advantage of the knowledge that the majority of traffic here is coming directly from that CoX server. That is what needs more development. If anything, you're guaranteed that any work done on the CoX work will be appreciated and used by many.

Not only that, but the further the project goes on, the more and more people will join. Even something basic, such as combat in outbreak against level 1's, would spark an immense amount of traffic. I haven't recommended the server to many friends at this point (Although I've shown screenshots, which quickly became popular) because it's a little complicated to download for the computer illiterate and there isn't combat yet. There isn't much to do to kill time in the game yet. Once combat is introduced, you'll have people spending hours trying out the old powers and killing NPCS. At that point, you'll find a ton of attention focused on this project.

It seems like specifically continuing on the CoX server is your best bet for your work to be appreciated and to be successful (Better attraction from Past/Present CoH coders).

Hope this helps. Continuation of the CoX client to something remotely playable would result in thousands of downloads of the client. We did have 20k+ sign the petition after all.

Sentry, thank You for your thoughts, we should do some of the things You've suggested.
I'll try to come up with extended answer to some of your points, but right now I'm integrating mruby into segs, so human2human communication suffers :)

I think I see where you're going with this nem. If I understand it correctly; attracting devs to simply complete the segs server software rather than just for one game will speed up the progress of developing server software. Eventually making it easy to incorporate cox or any other games into it.